Even if appearances are often deceiving, the eye wants its share. So, that’s what you need to remember if you want to know how to sell your house faster and better.
They may be clichés, but it is true that if you want to sell a product and you have many competitors, to achieve your goal you must first work on its presentation.
Otherwise, the risk is not selling, being forced to lower the price or wasting time on a sales operation that takes too long.
If this logic is valid in all sectors, it is even more important in the real estate market, where the product can represent the investment of a lifetime.
How to get noticed in the market? How to sell quickly? How to avoid receiving continuous requests for price adjustments?
Here’s the anwer to this and to our first question: what is Home Staging?
Home Staging: decorating to sell
Home staging is the decoration (and eventual renovation) of a home carried out with the aim of increasing its value before putting it up for sale.
Almost like a stage designer, the interior designer in this case does not work on creating a home for his clients; rather, he works to allow his clients to sell their property more quickly and profitably.
In this case, the decoration will not have to respond to the personal taste and needs of the owner, but to the target audience that the home stager himself has identified.
Therefore, in many cases, it can be an instrument used to rent the home at a better price.
Its usefulness is to allow the buyer to imagine the home ready to live in and is normally applied to newly built or unfurnished homes, although it can also be an investment that the owner decides to make to improve the appearance of a previously inhabited home.
In these latter cases, home staging can be limited to removing excessively personalized elements from the house.
Home staging obviously requires the work of several professionals, including the photographer.
Professional photographs of the home are indeed essential in the process of advertising the sale.
Who invented Home Staging?
Legend has it that Barb Schwarz, born in Kansas (USA) seventy-six years ago, was the first to realize the possibility of turning this need into a business.
Legend aside, what is certain is that Schwarz, who began her career as a real estate agent in the 1970s, is considered the pioneer of home staging.
She was the first to talk about home staging and to highlight it as a specific profession, perfectly interposing itself between the real estate sector and interior design.
Author of “Staging the world“, “Home staging business” and many other books, she developed specific techniques to prepare houses for sale, founded the International Association of Home Staging Professionals (IAHSP), an organization dedicated to the education and professionalization of home staging, and also founded StagedHomes.com, a company that offers training and certification for professional home stagers.
What does the Home Stager do?
While the interior designer is hired by the owner of a property to bring his dream home to life and the real estate agency intervenes at the time of the sale, the home stager prepares the property for potential buyers and, at the same time, for sale.
A good home stager must therefore have design skills but also know the real estate market.
If the home stager is faced with an uninhabited and empty property, his task will be to bring it to life, allowing the potential buyer to see and feel the spaces, communicating the potential of the house, highlighting its strengths, hiding the defects.
If the house he is dealing with is inhabited, he will most likely work by subtraction, depersonalizing and revising the house.
Home Staging, a real investment
Although home staging is a very common practice in the real estate market today, it was not always like this.
Even today, outside the professional field, many people do not know what home staging is or do not put it into practice.
In fact, although it is widespread among large real estate agencies and large investors, home staging is not an everyday practice in most sales.
A real shame since, in many cases, it is a very profitable investment.
Home staging, in fact, can not only allow a significant increase in the sale price and an average reduction of 2% only.
In fact, it turns out that the speed of the process is also much faster. Plus the investment is recovered much faster and with greater time savings.
The different phases of the home stager’s work are:
- market analysis, with a careful study of consumer trends
- the development of a marketing plan
- the creation of a sales and advertising strategy, thus lending itself to very close collaboration even with the most professional real estate agencies
- the design and virtual staging of the house, which already allows future clients to get a precise idea of the spaces and their possible use
- the physical staging of the house
- the creation of professional photographs and videos, which can be even more decisive for the sale.
A good choise after all
The whole operation, in fact, should be considered as a real investment. It is useful to increase the perceived value of the property and to sell sooner and at a better price.
According to the Home Staging Lovers association, without the home staging, a property can remain on the market for an average of 221 days.
On the contrary, home staging reduces timing to 48 days with an average discount on the price of 2% only.
In short, if you are trying to understand how to sell your house faster, home staging is the answer.
Faster than a full renovation, home staging is a bit like putting make-up on your apartment before it goes on sale.
After all, as Barb Schwarz likes to remind us, “home staging is a communication tool”.